Case Study: How We Used SegmentOS to Validate SegmentOS (And Got a 90% "Go" Signal)

The hardest part of Product Management isn't coming up with ideas. It's deciding which ones to kill.

Your Jira backlog is overflowing. Sales wants Feature A, Customer Success wants Feature B, and your CEO wants Feature C because they saw a competitor do it.

How do you decide what to build next without starting a political war internally? You need a framework.

Two of the most popular frameworks are RICE Scoring and the Kano Model. But they approach the problem from completely different angles. Here is how to choose between them—and the one missing ingredient that makes both of them actually work.

The RICE Score: The Internal Calculator

RICE is an internal scoring system designed to remove emotion from prioritization. You assign a number to four factors to get a single score for each feature.

• Reach: How many users will this impact over a given period?

  
  

• Impact: How much will this move the needle on our key metric (e.g., conversion rate)?

  
  

• Confidence: How sure are we about our Reach and Impact estimates? (Percentage).

  
  

• Effort: How many "person-months" will this take to build?

(Reach x Impact x Confidence) / Effort = RICE Score.

When to use it: When you have many similar ideas and need a cold, mathematical way to rank them based on ROI.

The Kano Model: The Customer Whisperer

While RICE focuses on business metrics, the Kano Model focuses on customer satisfaction. It categorizes features based on how users feel about them.

Must-Be (Basic): If you don't have it, they hate you. If you do, they are just neutral. (e.g., A login button).

• Performance (Linear): The better it is, the happier they are. (e.g., Faster page load speeds).

  
  

• Delighters (Excitement): They don't expect it, but if you add it, they love you. (e.g., A surprise free gift).

When to use it: When you need to balance your roadmap between fixing basic bugs and adding exciting new features.